The thing at the controls concentrated on the setting of more studs, then said: “You’ll never be ready. You’re like a candle in the wind, waiting for a gust that will puff you out.”
Through the vision plates Lathrop could see the harsh blackness of space, dotted here and there with unfamiliar stars, dusted with faint mists that were distant galaxies.
Somewhere, far back toward the center of the Universe, millions of light-years from where they cruised, lay the Milky Way, home galaxy of the planets that circled Helios.
Lathrop tried to think back the way they’d come, tried to think back to green Earth and red Mars, but time blurred the road of thought and other memories encroached, cold, fear-etched memories that reached for him like taloned, withered claws.
Memories of alien lands acrawl with loathesomeness and venom. Strange planets that were strange not because they were alien, but because of the abysmal terror in the very souls of them. Memories of shambling things that triumphed over pitiful peoples whose only crime was they could not fight back.
He shook his head, as if to shake the memories away, but they wouldn’t go. He knew they would never go. They would always walk with him, would wake him screaming from his sleep.
They stayed now, those memories, and shrieked at him — rolling, clanging phrases that bit into his brain. Thundering the soul-searing saga of the elder evil that squatted on the outer worlds. Evil on the move, gobbling up the galaxies, marching down the star streams. Unnatural hungers driving sickening hordes across the gulfs of space to raven and to plunder.
Everything the human race held close, he knew, were alien traits to these races he had seen — not alien in the sense they were not recognized, but more terribly alien in that they could not be recognized. There was simply no place in the make-up of those hordes for the decency and love and loyalty that lay inherent in the people of the Earth. The creeds of Earth could never be their creeds — they could no more understand the attitude of the Earthman than the Earthman could understand their sense of rightness in total evil.
“I don’t thank you for what you’ve done,” Stephen Lathrop told the thing.
“I don’t expect your thanks,” the creature replied. “I’ve shown you the Universe, a cross section of it, enough so you can see what is in store for the human race.”